By Juliana George
MAY 14, 2025
I grew up 10 minutes away from a detention center that once held over 5,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans.
At the time, I only knew it as the Fairplex, a 487-acre plot of land that hosted fried food stands and rickety carnival rides every year during the Los Angeles County Fair. But the nostalgic place where I used to gorge on cotton candy and coo at baby farm animals was once known as the Pomona Assembly Center, and it operated for 110 days in 1942 as a temporary detention facility for Japanese American Californians.
Like me, about two-thirds of the Japanese Americans incarcerated after Pearl Harbor were born and raised in the United States. Of those imprisoned at the Pomona Assembly Center, some may have grown up going to the LA County Fair, which was first held in 1922. They may have wandered the dusty fairgrounds trying their luck at the ring toss or perusing exhibits on California history, like I did. They may have even watched a childhood site of cherished memories transform into a miserable, makeshift detention center that preceded their eventual imprisonment at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming.
The fair took a few years off during the war. It resumed in 1948, six years after the last Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and three years after they were given $25 and a train ticket to return to lives that no longer belonged to them.
This tragic historical moment did not haunt me, not even subconsciously. I didn’t feel the shadow of injustice looming over me and my kind as I came of age in sheltered California suburbia, and I had no reason to—after all, my family didn’t touch down in the United States until 1970, well after World War II and five years after the Hart-Celler Act abolished former national-origin quotas and exclusions in American immigration policy.
To me, being Japanese American in Southern California meant eating mochi on New Year’s Day and somen in the summer; it meant bonding with my Asian American friends over our strict mothers and shared taste in food; occasionally, it meant hearing racist nursery rhymes on the playground or mean comments about my supposedly exotic lunches. I wasn’t even aware of Japanese American incarceration until high school.
My unlikely educator was the actor George Takei, of Star Trek fame, who grew up in Los Angeles but spent the early years of his childhood incarcerated in concentration camps in Arkansas and Northern California. His experiences loosely inspired the Broadway musical Allegiance, which follows a Japanese American family wrestling with the realities of incarceration at Heart Mountain. The musical, starring Takei, came to the Aratani Theatre in Little Tokyo in 2018, where I saw it with my family.
Despite its historical inaccuracies and mixed critical reviews, Allegiance was a compelling introduction to Asian American history for the person I was back then: a 14-year-old half-Japanese theater kid eager for onstage representation that overcame the Orientalist pitfalls of Miss Saigon. While at times overly dramatized and slightly trite, Allegiance imbued a fair amount of nuance into the range of war-era Japanese American experiences, sympathizing with both draft-dodging resisters and defiant patriots who enlisted in the 442nd Infantry Regiment to reassert their Americanness.
As silly as it sounds, sitting misty-eyed in the audience of Allegiance may have been the first time I thought of my racial identity as political. It had always been cultural—a spectral force enriching some relationships and alienating me from others; creating a shared language of universalized experiences between me and my Asian peers; itching at the back of my brain whenever I thought about the historically doomed imperial pairing of Asian woman/(mostly) white man that led to my conception (see Miss Saigon). Politically, I mostly sided with my parents, progressive Christian Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders and then Hillary Clinton. But ensconced in the comforts of my diverse, liberal West Coast bubble, I didn’t feel like I was racialized in Trump’s America in the same way my Black and Latino peers were.
And then, a little over a year after I saw Allegiance, my AP U.S. history teacher dropped the Fairplex bombshell, and I realized that regardless of when my family immigrated to the United States, the label “Asian American” came with baggage that was closer to home than I thought. Japanese American incarceration wasn’t just a proverbial original sin of Asian American history—it was merely one event in the ongoing project of racialization under the U.S. empire.
If you belong to the same school of thought as Korean American writer and podcaster Jay Caspian Kang, you might say that my Allegiance revelation was little more than a subconscious attempt to insert myself into America’s Black-and-white racial binary; to squeeze myself into a mythical, oversimplified identity category called “Asian American” that’s been many sizes too small since the Asian American activist era of the 1960s and ’70s gave way to the neoliberal identity politics of the 1980s and beyond. In fact, because of my mixed heritage and sansei (third-generation) status, Kang would probably question my right to call myself Asian at all, as he did with his own half-white, half-Korean daughter in his 2021 memoir The Loneliest Americans.
My family falls under the category of “post-Hart-Celler,” a classification that constitutes the majority of Asian Americans today. In Kang’s opinion, post-Hart-Celler Asian Americans are a fragmented group of people divided irrevocably by different class and ethnic backgrounds. The only force uniting middle and upper class Asian Americans, according to Kang, is a shared desire to assimilate into the privileges of whiteness while benefiting from superficial cultural differences and flimsy racism narratives that set us apart from the white ruling class. Kang asserts that a panethnic Asian American history that combines Chinese exclusion, Japanese American incarceration, and the murder of Vincent Chin is as incoherent as it is vastly unrelatable.
“Our great grandparents weren’t herded up in Los Angeles; our parents did not stand with the Panthers or the Third World Liberation Front,” he wrote. So what does that history have to do with people like us?
In some ways, Kang is right. Other than our common cultural heritage and California roots, I did not share lived experiences or histories with the characters in Allegiance. But I don’t think my reaction to the performance had much to do with the “loneliness” central to Kang’s thesis, the cultural loneliness that purportedly drives upwardly mobile Asian-descended Americans to invent an imaginary collective racial identity. Rather, it opened my eyes to nascent ideas about Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, about racial hierarchy and the limits of assimilation, and about my identity being political, whether I liked it or not. My physical and cultural proximity to the characters in Allegiance and other victims of Japanese American incarceration were not essential in my coming to these conclusions, but they didn’t hurt.
I can’t write about Asian America without starting at Berkeley, 1968: the year the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), a joint community and campus organization founded at UC Berkeley by then-student activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, became widely known as the first group to use the label “Asian American” to organize Americans of Asian descent on a national scale.
In May of 1968, the AAPA published an article drawing parallels between Japanese American incarceration and the McCarran Internal Security Act, a 1950 law that allowed the federal government to detain anyone suspected of engaging in “subversive activities,” otherwise known as communism. This sparked one of the earliest mainstream conversations surrounding Japanese American concentration camps, a subject that had remained shrouded in silence for years—and the AAPA invoked this history specifically as a line of solidarity between the newly minted “Asian Americans” and the Black Power revolutionaries to whom the McCarran Act posed the greatest threat.
The AAPA engaged in a number of other local and transnational movements, including resisting the displacement of Filipino Americans in San Francisco’s Manilatown and joining the nationwide anti-Vietnam War protests. In November of the same year, AAPA chapters at Berkeley and San Francisco State College joined the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strikes at their respective colleges, demanding a school of Third World studies and greater racial diversity among the faculty and student body.
The panethnicity of the term “Asian American” was essential to the AAPA’s goal of uniting different Asian-descended communities around shared struggles against racism, imperialism, and capitalism. Panethnicity worked in tandem with cross-racial solidarity, as the AAPA striked alongside the Black Student Union and the Latin American Student Organization in the TWLF and took political inspiration from the Black Panther Party and the Civil Rights Movement.
Despite its radical origins, the panethnicity of Asian America has its fair share of critics today, Kang among them. There is a gulf of difference between the Asian America of 1968, a population of around 1.5 million that mainly consisted of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino Americans, and the Asian America of 2025. At a population of 24 million, Asian Americans are now the fastest-growing racial group in the nation and hail from over 20 countries.
It’s no surprise that a community experiencing such explosive expansion, both in ethnic diversity and sheer volume, has had growing pains. Income and education levels vary wildly among Asian Americans, as do the material realities and political identities of Asians who enter the country as “skilled workers” on H-1B visas as opposed to those fleeing poverty, war, or genocide. Thinkers like Kang ask, in the context of today’s disparate Asian-descended community, is there really such a thing as an “Asian American”? And if there is, what does it mean to be Asian American without a cohesive cause to organize behind?
These questions didn’t go unnoticed by the Asian American activists of the late ’60s and early ’70s. From the start, the AAPA was founded with ideological principles that decisively opposed identity politics and racial liberalism in favor of liberation and anti-imperialism. They never intended the term “Asian American” to be a homogeneous, all-encompassing racial category. The AAPA constructed this identity as a tool for politically mobilizing against forces of domination that oppress not only people of Asian descent, but also the globally impoverished, racialized, and subjugated. The AAPA conceived of the label “Asian American”—to use the words of scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis—as a way to “bas[e] the identity on politics rather than the politics on identity.”
But identity is a slippery thing.
After nearly five months, the TWLF strikes ended and “Third World studies” was amended to “ethnic studies” upon institutionalization at Berkeley and SFSC. This renaming represented a conscious flattening and depoliticization of the proposed Third World curriculum, which the late ethnic studies scholar Gary Y. Okihiro explores in his 2016 book Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation. Okihiro traces the evolution of post-1968 ethnic studies into contemporary manifestations of multiculturalism and cultural nationalism, which superficially celebrate diversity and inclusion while buying into assimilation and tacit acceptance of the imperial world order.
Rather than reflecting the radical principles of the TWLF, this discipline enabled academic institutions to advertise their new melting pot of course offerings as a selling point to prospective students (and donors). In other words, higher academia did not view ethnic studies as a threat to its power hierarchy in the way the TWLF intended.
We can see the same process of elite capture in American politics and popular culture.
Andrew Yang reaped the benefits of identity politics during his candidacies for president in 2020 and New York City mayor in 2021, appealing to a swath of previously politically inactive Asian American voters. He also perpetuated dangerous narratives about Asian Americans as needing to “step up” to prove their Americanness in the face of xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic and advocated for increased funding for the NYPD, an initiative that would harm the city’s working class and Black and brown populations.
In 2018, a few months after I saw Allegiance, the film Crazy Rich Asians released in theaters, billed as the first Hollywood blockbuster to feature a majority-Asian cast since Joy Luck Club (1993). Received with positive reviews and countless essays on the joys of representation, Crazy Rich Asians ushered in a new renaissance of Asian American media. Now we have a Marvel movie, an Academy Award Best Picture winner, numerous Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, lots of straight-to-streaming romantic comedies, and even a few Regency-era socialites on Bridgerton. I’ve personally seen countless TikToks in which Gen-Z Asian Americans prepare a traditional dish from their culture, narrated by a stinky lunch anecdote like the one I shared earlier, and end with something like, “I used to get teased for eating kimchi, but now everybody likes Korean barbecue!”
Kang points to the celebration of these “wins” as evidence of a shallow, artificially constructed identity. I don’t deny that Asian American identity is socially constructed, but I think there’s a more nuanced reason why the label has lost its teeth—rather than focusing on imagined “Asian excellence” and working to slot ourselves into pre-established power structures, we need to fight against the structures that have racialized us in the first place, the same structures that create an international class of subjugated peoples.
As Okihiro wrote, “Black (or Brown, Red, and Yellow) Power is a potent antidote to the poison of white supremacy, but it follows and is in reaction to white power and is accordingly limited by its model and prior condition.”
My first consideration of “Asian American” as a political identity may have come from watching George Takei sing about Japanese American resilience in an air-conditioned theater, but for much of Asian America, this realization crystallized during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After the outrage over Vincent Chin’s racially motivated murder in 1982 died down in the ’90s, Asian Americans largely flew under the political radar for years. The most prominent Asian-centric topic in the mainstream conversation was affirmative action, an issue that had long divided the community, but this was something only certain segments of the population were paying attention to. When conservatives invoked “illegals” and “aliens,” we could count on the fact that they were usually referring to immigrants from south of the border and not the docile, high-achieving ones from halfway around the world.
And then, in 2020, suddenly we were in the news. President Donald Trump referred to the coronavirus as the “China virus” and “kung flu.” Videos and news stories started popping up of Asian Americans, particularly elders, being beaten or otherwise harassed. In 2021, an 84-year-old Thai man named Vicha Ratanapakdee died from head trauma after a Black teenager pushed him to the ground in San Francisco. The same year, a 21-year-old white man shot and killed eight people at three Atlanta spas, six of them Asian women. In the victims, we saw our grandparents, our parents, our friends. It seemed Yellow Peril was back.
Just like Third World studies, the sudden spike in anti-Asian violence and resultant newly unified (East and Southeast) Asian American consciousness were not immune to elite capture.
Fear and anger over suspected hate crimes and high-profile anti-Asian xenophobia quickly birthed several new charitable organizations, including Stop AAPI Hate and The Asian American Foundation (TAAF). These organizations thrive off sensationalizing anti-Asian violence, or what Taiwanese researcher Wen Liu called “the politics of racial injury” in a recent essay for positions politics. Liu writes that by emphasizing isolated incidents of violence and positioning Trump’s rhetoric as the direct cause, Stop AAPI Hate obscures the larger structures of racial capitalism and U.S. imperialism that inform this “hate.”
More notably, TAAF’s close ties to the Zionist Anti-Defamation League reveal an equally sinister agenda to configure anti-Asian racism in the same way the ADL has configured antisemitism: as a tool for advancing racist, colonial narratives that justify the systemic marginalization of historically oppressed groups.
For TAAF, this means promoting anti-Asian hate crime legislation that increases policing and carceral measures that hurt working class Black and brown Americans. For the ADL, this means ethnically cleansing Palestinians with the military arm of the U.S.-funded apartheid state of Israel and silencing critics through the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism.
For me, the Stop Asian Hate movement produced many moments of cognitive dissonance, especially as it played out alongside the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and 2021. Both movements generated similarly bizarre liberal anti-racism campaigns, like Instagram’s black square trend and the weirdly opportunistic “stop asian hate” selfie booth that appeared in a shopping mall 30 minutes from my house. But more than that, the Stop Asian Hate movement seemed completely devoid of a collective goal in the way that Black Lives Matter mobilized protesters in favor of police abolition. “Hate” is too nebulous of a concept to meaningfully oppose, so the movement’s leaders turned to pre-established carceral solutions.
This is the real danger of an identity without political basis. Corny diaspora fiction and media narratives are just symptoms of a larger sickness: if we stand for nothing, our identity can be co-opted for any purpose.
Sitting in her office on Northeastern University’s Boston campus, professor of anthropology and global Asian studies Sasha Sabherwal tells me that most of the students who take her “Intro to Asian American Studies” course come into the class prepared to air out their indignation about COVID-era anti-Asian racism.
Sabherwal understands the feeling, but she also encourages her students to look beyond the specific events of Asian American history to more global systems of domination.
“Asian American Studies isn’t just about Asian Americans; it’s a framework for thinking about questions of power,” she explained. “As Asian Americans, we might be both victims of certain kinds of harm and complicit in perpetuating other systems of oppression.”
Sabherwal was part of a cluster hire for the new global Asian studies department at Northeastern, which the university authorized in response to demands from Asian American students following the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. This student protest took place during the thick of the pandemic, and was consequently almost entirely online, a far cry from the TWLF strikes. It didn’t take too much convincing for the university to acquiesce, probably because they already knew what Berkeley and SFSC learned back then: once institutionalized, ethnic studies would no longer be a threat.
Just a few years later, the situation at Northeastern is very different. In light of the Trump administration’s crusades against diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, Sabherwal worries she may not be able to continue teaching in the near future. For now, she tries her best to engage with students at their level, teasing out their ideas about identity, panethnicity, and power.
Because many of her students began by regurgitating the talking points of Stop AAPI Hate, Sabherwal was careful to both acknowledge the Stop Asian Hate movement as a “turning point for building political momentum and consciousness” in the Asian American community and introduce the tension of the movement’s ties to Zionism and policing. When students questioned why these connections exist, she was able to introduce a wider conversation about the history of yellow washing (and Black, brown, pink, and rainbow washing) tactics in Israel as a means for rebranding Israel as a progressive, civilized counterpart to the conservative, uncivilized, Orientalized Palestine.
These discussions were challenging, especially in a course that many students enrolled in to fill an elective or diversity requirement. On some days, Sabherwal became frustrated with the feeling she wasn’t reaching her students. Still, she finds the classroom to be a site rich with potential for liberation and hope, and she treats it as a space for building political awareness and relationships.
After the lessons on Chinese exclusion, Japanese American incarceration, settler colonialism in Hawai’i, U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, Edward Said’s Orientalism, Vincent Chin, and post-9/11 Islamophobia, Sabherwal’s “Intro” course turns to what she calls “Asian American futures.”
The future of Asian America isn’t something that’s totally clear to Sabherwal, to me, or to anyone. But one thing is certain: if we want “Asian American” to be more than a demographic box, or a homogenized identity that gets hijacked by other movements to maintain the racial and imperial hierarchy, we need to recommit to the anti-imperial principles the term was founded on.
Envisioning a future for Asian America that is driven by multi-ethnic, cross-racial, and class unity against imperialism and capitalism sounds daunting, but it starts with imagination. It starts with learning Asian American history, and examining the ways our histories intersect with the histories of other marginalized groups. It starts with building community power through political organizing; the Asian American Feminist Collective in New York City, the Asian American Resource Workshop in Boston, and the global Malaya Movement and Palestinian Youth Movement are a few examples.
“If we can imagine beyond identity politics, I think there’s so much value in the category,” Sabherwal said. “But as it is, it’s become part of the institutions we all occupy.”
Before I could begin to think about the future of Asian America, I had to reckon with the ways my world had been shaped by its past. The notion of a political Asian America—or, for that matter, a depoliticized Asian America—was far from my mind as I happily overlooked my hometown from the Ferris wheel in my beloved prison-turned-fairground. But once the grim history of Japanese American concentration camps broke through the rose-tinted glass of my mostly apolitical childhood, the revelations kept coming.
From the infamous 1966 New York Times op-ed “Success Story, Japanese American-style” (credited with popularizing the model minority myth) to the horrifyingly named “Daniel K. Inouye Arrow Anti-Missile Defense Facility” in Israel, actors with insidious racist and imperial schemes have been stealing and profiting from Japanese American identity for years. Like Inouye, the late senator from Hawai’i and a vocal Zionist advocate, many have themselves been Japanese American.
To me, being Japanese American still means all the things I thought it meant growing up. But it also means vehemently rejecting narratives that seek to co-opt my identity, and carving out space for the inherently political identity I believe in.
Juliana George is the managing editor of Illume Magazine.
illume magazine 
Leave a comment